Hunger

ONF | NFB

Animation
10 min     6.2     1974     Canada

Overview

16mm. In one of the first films to use computer animation, director Peter Foldès depicts one man’s descent into greed and gluttony. Combining traditional and computer animation (one of the first to use it!), Peter Foldes, through clever metamorphosing images and powerful line drawings, provides a moralistic tale of one man’s enormous appetite and selfish consumerism. Growing more corpulent and repulsive, his indigestion leads to a nightmare where he is consumed in a hell of emaciated bodies. By extension, this film indicts affluent nations and individuals in a world where many starve.

Reviews

CinemaSerf wrote:
I wasn't sure until the end if this might not have been better called 'Appetite". It's a very early computer generated animation that depicts just how easy it makes it for us, as human beings, to embrace a convenience society in which all sense of proportion is compromised. The imagery here isn't my favourite style of presentation, but as we see the original character morph into the end product, it's about as allegorical as you can get to the expansion of a societal need to take, and to take more and then to keep on taking - at the expense of ourselves and others or both. It becomes a grotesque travesty of humanity or perhaps a validation of what we want from it? There's something almost Dickensian about the conclusion and it's quite a thought provoking ten minutes that fifty years on might prove a little more providential than any of us might like!

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